Kansas City & Johnson County
Paver patio vs concrete patio
Both can be built well. Both get built badly. What separates them here is what the ground does to each one over ten winters, and what it costs you when something moves.
Both can be built well. Both get built badly. What separates them here is what the ground does to each one over ten winters, and what it costs you when something moves.
The comparison only makes sense once you know what is under each surface. That is where every difference comes from.
Forms get set. The soil is graded and compacted over a few inches of gravel. Reinforcement goes in — mesh, rebar, or fibre in the mix. Concrete is placed in one continuous pour, typically four inches thick, then floated, finished and jointed. A residential exterior mix is commonly 3,500 to 4,500 psi, and outdoors here it should be air-entrained so freezing water has room to expand. The finished patio is a single rigid plate, and its strength is the concrete itself.
Excavate 7 to 10 inches. Compact the soil subgrade. Separation fabric over the clay. Then 4 to 6 inches of dense-graded aggregate compacted in lifts, and 1 inch of screeded concrete sand. Set the pavers, spike the edge restraint into the base, plate-compact the field, sweep joint sand in and vibrate again.
The finished patio is a flexible pavement. Its strength is the base underneath and the interlock between units. ASTM C936 requires those units to average 8,000 psi, absorb no more than 5%, and take at least 50 freeze-thaw cycles with under 1% material loss.
One is a plate. The other is a field of small units on a base. Everything below follows from that.
The subsoil across most of Johnson County is silty clay loam — Grundy and Sharpsburg under Overland Park, Leawood, Olathe and Prairie Village. High shrink-swell. It takes on water in a wet spring and expands, dries out in August and shrinks, and it does not move uniformly: one corner of a 400 square foot patio can be doing something different from the opposite corner. On top of that, the metro crosses the freezing point and back dozens of times between November and March.
Put a rigid plate over ground that moves differentially and the movement becomes bending stress. Concrete is strong in compression and weak in tension. It cracks where the tension is.
Put a field of separate units on the same ground and each moves slightly against its neighbours. The sand joints take up the difference. Nothing is continuous, so nothing has to break to relieve the stress. That is the whole argument for pavers here, and it is mechanical, not a matter of taste.
Surface durability goes the same way. Deicing salt drives scaling on concrete, and a slab placed with too little entrained air starts losing its top layer within a few winters. If one paver deteriorates, you replace one paver.
A slab is going to crack. Control joints choose the line. ACI guidance for slabs on grade puts maximum joint spacing in feet at roughly two to two and a half times the slab thickness in inches — so a four inch slab wants joints every eight to ten feet, cut at least a quarter of the slab depth, and cut early, before the concrete shrinks enough to crack on its own.
Joints at sixteen feet, or a saw cut three-eighths deep on a four inch slab, means the slab picks its own crack. That is most of the random cracking in the fifty-year-old back yard concrete I get called out to remove, and a fair amount of the five-year-old concrete too.
A paver field has a joint every few inches by design. There is no crack in a paver patio, because there is nothing continuous to crack.
A low spot in a paver patio is fixable. Lift the pavers with an extractor, correct and recompact the base, re-screed the bedding sand, set the same pavers back, re-sand the joints. If they were blended from several bundles when they went in, the patch does not read. Half a day on a small area, and you keep the material you already paid for.
A cracked slab cannot be uncracked. Live with it, fill it with a patch that stays visible, grind and overlay it and watch it come back at the same line, saw out a section in concrete that will not match, or take the whole thing out. Utility work is the same: a trench through a paver field gets put back, a trench through a slab means breaking the slab. A settled slab can be raised by mudjacking or foam through drilled holes — that works, but you are usually lifting a slab that already cracked along the settlement, and it does not address what moved it.
The honest caveat: resetting pavers is only cheap when the base was built right in the first place. If the base itself failed — never compacted, too thin, clay pumped up into the stone — you are rebuilding the base, and that runs about $7 to $30 per square foot here. Pavers give you a cheaper recovery than concrete. Not a free one.
Stamped concrete is a slab with texture pressed into it and colour worked into the top. Everything above about jointing, cracking and settlement still applies — and a crack is worse on stamped, because it runs across a pattern meant to read as cut stone.
The colour is the other thing. It lives in the top surface and in the sealer. The common recommendation is resealing every two to three years, with a typical residential acrylic averaging around two and a half. Miss it and the colour goes flat and the surface starts taking on water. Overdo it and you build film that delaminates. It is a recurring cost with a wrong answer on both sides, and it never appears on the original bid.
To be fair: on a large simple rectangle with good drainage and a competent crew, stamped concrete is fast, cheaper than pavers, and can look good for a long time if the owner keeps up with sealing. It is a real option, not a straw man.
A standard paver patio installed in Johnson County runs roughly $18 to $35 per square foot, with $25 to $28 the realistic mid-market figure. Premium units and natural stone run $40 to $60. Those are my numbers for this market.
I do not pour concrete, so I will not invent slab pricing. Published 2026 figures for the Kansas City area put a plain concrete patio at roughly $4 to $12 per square foot and stamped at roughly $8 to $18. Treat that as the public range, not a quote.
Concrete is cheaper to install, usually by a wide margin. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you something.
It turns around over the life of the patio, and I will not put a fake lifetime figure on that either, because it depends almost entirely on how well each was built. The shape of it is this. The paver number is close to all of what you spend — sweep it, top the joint sand up when it thins, reset a section if something moves. The concrete number is the opening figure: add sealing every few years if it is stamped, add crack repair that never looks right, add the possibility of demolition and a second install. Paver spend is front-loaded and predictable. Concrete spend is back-loaded and it is not.
A page that says pavers win every time is a sales pitch. Here is where I would tell you to pour.
The general version: a properly jointed, air-entrained slab on a compacted base, in a yard that drains away from the house, is a good patio. Most of the failed concrete I look at here did not get one or more of those things.
Not if the base is right. They sink when the subgrade was not compacted, the base was too thin, or there was no fabric between clay and stone. A build problem, not a paver problem.
Sometimes. The slab has to be sound, sloped and free of working cracks, and you have to solve the added height at the door threshold. Worth checking before anyone quotes demolition.
Sources. Installation specs and paver unit requirements: ICPI Tech Spec 2 and Tech Spec 3, and ASTM C936. Control joint spacing and depth: ACI guidance for slabs on grade (ACI 360R). Johnson County soil series and shrink-swell ratings: USDA NRCS soil survey data. Kansas City concrete and stamped concrete price ranges: published 2026 regional figures from Angi, not my own pricing. Resealing intervals: the common recommendation across decorative concrete manufacturers and installers. Paver installation and repair pricing is mine, for Johnson County.
Next: why two patio bids for the same patio can be $8,000 apart →
I come stand in the yard, take the measurements, and write down what actually goes under the patio before I give you a number.